Carmilla

Best Bloodies

Carmilla
UK 2019 Directed by Emily Harris
Bird Flight Films

Warning: Slight spoilers if you don’t know the original
story or any of its subsequent screen adaptations.

Carmilla is yet another screen version of Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 serialised novella of the same name and, by this point, one wonders how many times this tale of sapphic vampirism by way of passive and undetected home invasion can be committed to celluloid. That being said, Jean Rollin forged a career out of making surreal and truly astonishing, beautiful lesbian vampire movies (none of which were particularly inspired by Carmilla, I believe) so, maybe the answer is... plenty.

Well, when you have a film as good as Emily Harris’ new iteration of the source, you know there’s at least room for one more... although it would be fair to say I had a few small problems with it. Instead of going straight for the jugular, so to speak, here she instead opts to step right back from the vampiric qualities of the original, toning it down to such an extent that at one point I wondered if this really was a version of Le Fanu’s classic after all. As it happens, the vampirism is indeed included in this story but mostly through the deeds and implication of the characters at the periphery of the main focus of the main protaginist Lara (changed from Laura in the book) and the girl she, in this version of the story, names Carmilla (in the original text, as I’m sure many a Hammer Horror fan can tell you, it was itself an anagram of the first name of Mircalla Karnstein but, in this version, the famous ‘K’ word never comes up).

So yeah, I was a bit taken aback that both the vampirism and, honestly, the lesbianism of the subject was handled almost from a distance, at least in terms of overtly showing the harder edges (or should that be softer curves) of the latter element. In spite of all this though, the film has an amazing amount of positives and I’ll focus on those for a moment.

One is the acting. The main female trio of Lara, Carmilla and Lara’s governess Miss Fontaine are played by three very capable actresses who really make the film work on the performance level. Miss Fontaine is played by Jessica Raine (who readers may best remember for her turn as Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert in An Adventure In Space And Time, which I reviewed here... as well as in one of the better episodes of the modern version of the show, reviewed here) and she does her usual, wonderful job. Lara, played by Hannah Rae, does an absolutely brilliant turn here and, since the film is almost solely viewed through her character’s eyes, she almost carries the movie on her own. Carmilla herself is played by Devrim Lingnau, who does a remarkable job of breaking through the veneer of suppression which characterises Lara’s home and is exactly the brash and earthy creature (curious, perhaps, for an unearthly character) that you’d expect in a good version of Carmilla Karnstein. Although, she almost seems a little too young for the role at times.

So, yeah, fair enough, we have some great performances here. However, the real star of the show is the beautiful cinematography and shot designs that the director infuses the story with. Contrasting many shots of the beauty of nature with various insects and bugs in close up, to remind the viewer of the nature of the vampiric creature now residing in Lara’s home. Indeed, from early on in the film we hear Lara being reminded of why flowers look and smell so pretty, in order to attract the bees to pollinate them... so already the director is pushing a vampiric metaphor of an organism which uses something else for propagation, so to speak. So, great and beautifully shot wide open spaces might well be tempered with the close up sights and sound of ants crawling on a tree or worms turning in the earth. And it looks quite wonderful and certainly acts as a salve, in my case, to distract from the extraction of the details of the original story.

The director loves making nice, clean shots and there are some strong symmetrical designs throughout. A shot of Miss Fontaine and Lara’s father addressing Lara from either side of the foreground of the frame as she is standing in front of a fireplace in the centre background of a shot comes to mind. Also, there’s a beautiful moment when a triangle on one third of the screen is joined by a diagonal separator with all the plains being out of focus. 

 This director is not afraid to use the extreme edges of the wide screen shot either... where two characters are talking for instance... and just leave space in the centre of the screen. There’s a real feel of meticulous and well thought out design to the film and, while some viewers might find the artifice of the photography distracting, I personally love this kind of cinema and admire it above all others (it’s why I love the cinema of the Italian giallo so much).

One thing which did bother me, though, was the use of lens flares. Despite using it myself just recently in my role as a graphic designer, I find the use of lens flares to call attention to the camera a real irritant and am not a fan. They’re all over this film... even in darkened interior shots and, frankly, after a while I just wanted to duck every time a flare of light sprang up on the screen. So, yeah, could have done with less of that.

My other little problem was that the writer/director has distanced the specifics of the action so much that, I suspect the film may be a little hard to follow for people who are unfamiliar with either the source or one of the more faithful, previous adaptations of it (actually, Hammer’s first Karnstein movie, The Vampire Lovers, which I reviewed here, is a surprisingly faithful primer if you’ve never read the original). Luckily, I knew the original but because the vampirism of the story is masked and fairly thinly alluded to, I think some viewers might not have any idea as to that element of the story, especially when various tropes of the genre are more or less done away with here. 

When Carmilla is, finally, staked there is no pre-warning and you don’t actually see it, just hear some thumping and moaning and, at this point, I was wondering what a certain section of the audience who had no idea this was in some way a vampire movie were supposed to think. I suppose the idea here is not to show that Carmilla is a vampire but, it’s more about the perceptions other people have of a person and the extremes they go to in order to make good on their assumptions. Thankfully, there is one brief shot of the aftermath to clue the more unsuspecting audiences in on what’s just been done to Carmilla... and it’s a shame it’s so brief because it’s a nicely brutal shot which really drives the message home, if you don’t blink and miss it. Again, though, I get the feeling that this is not the director saying... yes, she was a vampire. More saying, yes, this girl was suspected of being a vampire and this was the consequence of that suspicion (though, to be fair, Carmilla is all up for sucking Lara’s blood at one point).

One other thing I’ll briefly mention is the unusual score by Phil Selway. It uses a very small number of players (it seemed to me) and does some interesting things like, in some scenes, using high pitched and persistently reoccurring strings in a way which alerts the audience that something is going on, even when visually it’s maybe not too obvious that anything is amiss. That being said, it’s not overtly ‘stinger’ led or anything like that and it really hovers in the background, giving the film a coating of musical texture in the best way. It’s a shame that there’s no soundtrack CD available at time of writing this review because I’d really like to experience this as a stand alone listen. It’s certainly not a ‘horror’ score by any stretch and perfectly fits the restraint practiced and demonstrated by Emily Harris’ writing and direction.

And that’s me done with this latest version of Carmilla. It’s certainly not the least faithful ‘inspired by’ film but it’s also not something viewers might even realise was an ‘adaptation’ unless clued in by the name of the central vampire. Indeed, the coach crash which brings Carmilla to Lara’s door, so to speak, doesn’t even occur until almost half an hour into the movie. I don’t remember seeing Le Fanu mentioned in the credits at all (and I was watching out for it... maybe I missed it at the start, somehow), so I’m wondering how many of the potential audience for this quite strikingly shot and beautiful movie have missed this one. Certainly something I’d be happy to recommend with the caveat that it’s not anywhere near to being either a horror or straight vampire movie as you might expect from a film with this title. One to watch out for.